Should I Stay or Should I Go? Navigating the Target Register Outage

On June 15th and 16th, Target experienced register outages leading to long checkout lines and cash only sales at many stores. Lines snaked around stores and customers quickly became frustrated with long wait times.

What impact did this outage have? Were customers willing to stay and wait in line? Did shoppers who were planning on making a trip to Target skip it and go to a competitor instead?

Ubimo’s location intelligence uncovers visit trends to Target and its competitors during the weekend of the outage. Our findings show that Target lost customers the weekend of the outage mainly to one competitor, Costco.

Results

Results show that the outage had measurable impact on foot traffic to stores in addition to sales, which is estimated to be a loss of around $50 million.

How the Outage Impacted Store Foot Traffic

During the hours of the outage, around 2 to 5 pm EST, on Saturday 6/15:

Competitor Costco saw a 20.6% increase in foot traffic to their stores

Kroger saw a small increase of 3.7% in foot traffic

The day following the main outage when some Target stores still experienced issues:

Shoppers were still skeptical of going to Target, there was a 10.8% decrease in foot traffic to stores

Costco had a 9.1% increase in foot traffic

Kroger had a 3.0% increase in foot traffic

Costco won visitors during the outage. Going forward they should work to keep these visitors and create loyalty to their brand. Target lost visitors during the outage, but they can use it as a learning experience. Now they know their fiercest competitor is Costco. To get back on track, they should work to woo back these customers.

Analyzed Target and five competitors, Costco, KMart, Kroger, Sam’s Club, Walmart across the United States

Compared foot traffic on the weekend of the outage June 15-16 to foot traffic on other weekends at the same times as the control group

Disclaimer: This independent analysis is based on Ubimo’s location intelligence platform. As such, Ubimo does not have any relationship with companies featured in this report, nor should the independent analysis be construed in any way to suggest otherwise. Ubimo data is always anonymized and aggregated.